Because of well known health issues, the safe disposal of syringes and other “sharps” has long been a high priority for medical related professional facilities and industries. An increasing number of individuals are using medical sharps in private and public settings which use potentially creates a source of used and contaminated sharps outside of a relatively well controlled environment with established disposal protocols and collection points.
Medical delivery pens (hereinafter sometimes “MDPs”) have, more recently, become widely used instead of or in addition to syringes, e.g., by diabetics, who frequently inject themselves several times a day with accurately measured, adjustable, pre-selected amounts of insulin or other medication. Medical delivery pens include a reservoir of medication and a distal end adapted to be attached (usually by thread means) to a pen needle assembly (PNA). The pen needle assemblies typically include a removable thin sterile seal covering the proximal (large diameter) end of the said outer shield and a removable tube-like shield covering the distal portion of the hollow needle. The assembled pen needle assembly is then factory sterilized. The user of a pen needle assembly removes the seal from the outer shield, screws the pen into the proximal end of the pen needle housing, removes the outer and tube-like shields, sets the medical delivery pen for the desired dose of medication, and then inserts the distal end of the pen needle into the target tissue following which the medical delivery pen is actuated to deliver the desired dose of medication through the hollow needle into said tissue.
Many diabetics routinely administer medication to themselves several times a day by injection of a pre-selected quantity of insulin (or substitute medication) in liquid form; the correct amount of medication can be determined from prior professional medical instruction or by use of convenient portable blood analysis kits which are small, compact and provide rapid indicators of the user's blood sugar level. The several daily injections are often done away from the diabetic's home or residence which has made the use of the portable, convenient medical delivery pens widespread. The aforesaid testing kits and the medical delivery pens are relatively small in size and can easily fit within a woman's purse or equivalent. A typical scenario for a diabetic at a restaurant for a meal is to first use the blood sugar testing kit to obtain an indicator of his or her blood sugar level. This information then facilitates programming or adjusting the medical delivery pen to deliver the desired quantity of medication. Then the pen with an attached PN (a PNA sans the outer protective shield) is used to inject the medication. These steps require a relatively short length of time and can be done with minimum loss of privacy.
MDPs are also widely used by doctors, nurses and other professionals in their duties. Many individuals will request (sometimes insist) that an injection be done with a pen needle rather than a syringe.
Devices which dispense unused pen needle assemblies and subsequently receive and store used pen needle assemblies are now available and are well accepted for convenience and safety in minimizing user contact with used medical sharps; however the used sharps must still be treated with caution until they are returned to an appropriate medical waste facility. Larger facilities such as hospitals and clinics typically have regularly scheduled services which collect containers of medical waste and used medical sharps. In areas where such routine collection of medical waste is not readily available, it would be desirable to provide a system and method of consolidating medical sharps containers and packaging the consolidated material for return to an appropriate medical waste treatment facility. Often this may be conveniently accomplished at a facility such as a pharmacy which originally dispensed the medical sharps.